nickshanagher

Too many marketers focus on the pay-off that their product or service offers the consumer and miss the point about the architecture of how people decide what to buy. “When for example we must assess what price we are prepared to pay our decision is determined not only by the value we associate with that product but also by our expectations of what such a product should cost,” says Enrico Trevisan in The Irrational Consumer. His book explains how to apply behavioural economics to your business strategy. It deserves a space in every marketing toolkit as he teaches you the same things that you may have read in Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in a way that you can quickly apply to your plans. Trevisan is a partner with Simon-Kurcher & Partners, world leaders in price consulting, and his economical use of language helps you to focus on how to use the insight instead of admiring the genius of unlocking how people think. For wholesalers seeking to influence indepen...

There is an amazing fact near the start of Decoded, a new book from marketer Phil Barden. The average person takes 1.7 seconds to process the information in an advertisement in a magazine. But this does not really matter because all good marketing needs is this 1.7 seconds. People are programmed to respond quickly to the hundreds of thousands of things they “see” every day. If the marketing is right for what we are looking for, we will find the products we need. Even if we make mistakes, as we all do, all the time. But if we “were to reflectively think about every purchase decision in the supermarket, it would take so long to do our shopping that we would starve to death.” Barden’s work builds on the field of behavioural economics pioneered by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, whose brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow demonstrates that the way people behave is not as economists would like to think. In a chapter on optimising the path to purchase, Barden shows how good m...